This work had a long gestation period. My interest in things phonological began at Harvard, where, with very little preparation, I attempted to teach a course in Italian phonology, in the Spring of 1986. I am grateful to the participants of that course, not too numerous to mention. Andrea Calabrese, Elvira DiFabio and Daniel Radzinski showed remarkable patience with my amateurish efforts. Those efforts led among other things to the conviction that there must be some simple way to analyze Italian stress, which led in turn to intensified contacts with my former mentor at MIT Morris Halle, benefitting from his generous tutoring in the theory of stress over many individual appointments. Morris was instrumental in motivating me to undertake a serious study, but his contributions as a scholar and a tutor extend far beyond any one piece of research. They are the types of things that make this field worth being in. The mildly “rebellious” tone of the ensuing pages should not be misconstrued as any lack of gratitude towards him.

In my eager reading of the manuscript version of Halle and Vergnaud's An Essay on Stress obtained from Morris at that time, my instinct for finding cracks in the foundation gradually prevailed over my amazement at the size of the building, and I found myself searching for a different way of doing things, more congenial to my syntactician's intuitions.